Rich Chart Builder

Introduction

Probably the only thing more boring than text-filled slides is to endure
a series of slides with figures in tables -- something that looks like
a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet! With something like this, it would
almost be a challenge to create a captivating PowerPoint presentation that
keeps the audience sticking to their chairs. And the most obvious solution
is to use more media elements but it's not easy to create animated charts
that show figures more intuitively.

And since PowerPoint's version of animated charts are so passé,
you might want to create your charts in another program and then bring
them inside PowerPoint -- Rich Chart Builder, the product I am reviewing
can help.

About Rich Chart Builder

Rich Chart Builder is from Blue Pacific Software, a company
based in Portugal, Europe that creates Flash oriented rich media tools.
Their other products include Rich Chart Server, Turbine Video Encoder,
etc. You can learn more about these products and download a free trial
version of Rich Chart Builder from
their site...

You can also check out some Flash SWF charts with animation at this online
gallery...

Rich Chart Builder creates interactive and animated charts, with different
templates and styles of charts to choose from like 3D, shaded chart styles,
etc. It allows to add audio narration and even allows to publish the charts
into Flash SWF, PowerPoint PPT, PDF and JPG

Download and Installation

Download the installer from the link given above, run the setup routine
and follow the instructions. You'll end up with an Rich Chart Builder program
group in your Windows Start menu (see Figure 1 below).

This launches the Rich Chart Builder. When the application opens for
the first time, you'll be shown a dialog box with various default templates
available. You can also create a blank project, open an existing project,
or open the last project you worked with (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Welcome Dialog Box

For this tutorial I have opted to create a blank project. Clicking
the Start button opened the Rich Chart Builder interface with a new blank
project, as you can see in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Rich Chart Builder Interface

Since this is a blank project, the interface will open with an
empty scene until you enter some data values.

You can add data manually, or import it . Data can be imported by choosing
File | Import Data from File. Select a file with a extension of (.CSV)
a comma separated file -- most data and spreadsheet applications can
create CSV files.

For this tutorial, I manually input the data in the Data Tab, as
shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Rich Chart Builder Interface with Data

As soon as the data was input, a chart is created based on the
values.

The interface is explained below:

Preview is where you can see all the changes being
made.

Properties has six different tabs for parameters
and settings, which are explained below:

Data (see Figure 5) is where data
can be input by importing, copy-paste from Excel, or typing manually.
The other options at the right allow you to add rows and columns, and
to give names to their respective series.

Figure 5: Data

Series (see Figure 6) here you can
enhance the appearance of the chart by using options like series type,
sub-type, series style, color palette and value labels.

Figure 6: Series

Axes (see Figure 7) here
you can customized chart axes by choosing the axes type and
style, and other parameters like setting the color, etc.

Figure 7: Axes

Rich Media (see Figure 8)
has options to apply animation to the charts with controlling
the animation speed, audio files can be added, own voice can
be recorded and can be used for narration.

When all the settings are done, publish the chart into an output format.
Do preview the chart and the animations before publishing by choosing
the Publish | Preview (Ctrl+R) option.

After previewing the chart select Publish to Flash from Publish Tab
which opens a Publish to Flash dialog box as shown in Figure
11.

Figure 11: Publish to Flash

Provide movie dimensions and select other options as required.
Click Save and you are asked to provide a name and location for the output
file.

Note: The PowerPoint export option places a Flash SWF
movie on a PowerPoint slide. When the exported PowerPoint file is opened
for the first time, the slide containing the chart may appear to be blank.
To see the chart you need to play the presentation.

Also, the PDF and PowerPoint publish options are only available in the
Professional edition of Rich Chart Builder (see next section).

Conclusion

For what it does, Rich Chart Live is a very capable product. I do wish
they had better Excel support so that I could import Excel data, or maybe
even a small icon on an Excel toolbar that let me choose the data source.

That grouse aside, Rich Chart Builder is something that will make your
PowerPoint slides come alive with dynamic, animated charts that are so
much more interesting than normal PowerPoint charts.